Genesis Diaries: An Aside

This morning for the Genesis Diaries, I was absolutely planning on moving forward to the next set of verses.  I was derailed by something that I read recently.  

Actually there has been quite a lot that has been working on my heart lately.  The LORD is working on me regarding all sorts of issues, not the least of which is what it means to be a friend, disciple, servant, son, and beloved of Him.  We aren’t called just one thing to Him.  Some people theorize that we are one or the other in our lifetime but not all of these relationships with Him at once.  Certainly, as we grow in Christ throughout our lives we experience different levels as our maturity, wisdom, and walk show us the next step in the process of being perfected.  However, we never stop being the thing we just matured through.  It isn’t ever a new hat.  It’s one on top of the other.

How we approach each of those stages of relationship with God matters.  How we see God’s love for us through those stages matters.  

Many years ago I read “The Ragamuffin Gospel” by Brennan Manning and it changed my trajectory forever.  I realized with some amusement that I only ever read through it once and that was some fifteen years ago.  I flipped through it the other day and was struck by just how deeply Manning’s words resonated within me and they haven’t stopped echoing.  

I recently began reading his book “The Signature of Jesus” and the echoes will apparently only continue.

One part that struck me in particular was this quote: “All that we have and are is one of the unique and never-to-be-repeated ways God has chosen to express Himself in time and space.  Each of us, made in His image and likeness, is yet another promise He has made to the universe that He will continue to love it and care for it.”  

I’ve spoken before about mankind as God’s “idols”, there to work in unison with the Spirit of God to bless all of creation and one another.  The part here that smacked me upside the head was that I had never connected this to the uniqueness of each individual.

You are here in this time for a purpose and calling that is unique to you.  You are a, literally, once in a lifetime expression of God’s blessing to others.  Only YOU can say the words or perform the actions that God has given you in order to bless creation.  I can only say things the way I say them, and my words won’t reach into everyone’s chest and turn their hearts toward the Father.  I don’t even think they would reach the majority.  I’m a very niche market.  I’m anchovies.  But you…you were made to reach people, serve, be a support, comfort, and encourage in a way that I never was.  

I will never be Joel Osteen (thank you LORD).  I wasn’t put on this earth to be John Piper.  If I tried to be like Billy Graham I would fail.  If I tried to sound like Rick Joyner I’m pretty sure people would laugh at me and be right to.  You weren’t meant to be them either.

Your purpose and reach may be one million or it may be one.  You might bless through music, or paintings, or scrapbooking, accounting, business administration or cleaning toilets.

And here’s the absolutely wonderful thing: Whether you bless millions or one, whether you end up a billionaire or cleaning his pool…the response to faithfulness is still the same.  “Well done, good and faithful servant.”  God utters that phrase when you are faithful to how He “uttered” you into the world.  

“Great, Will.  Now I feel even more pressure to perform and I’m having  panic attack about whether or not I’m in God’s will,” I hear you say…mostly because that is where my heart has traditionally gone as well.  Even now I can hear it whispering to me from some shadowed corner of my mind.  I assure you that your anxiety is as misplaced as mine is.  How can we know God’s will and how we are to bless others?  It is quite simple.  You engage in one of the primary things He created us for from the Garden.  

Relationship with Him.

I made the mistake many years ago of believing that reading the Bible, reading other Christian materials and having a good understanding of God was what it meant to have a relationship with Him.  Prayer and attending church also supposedly helped because it meant that you had right thinking about God or perhaps right prioritization.  

My brothers and sisters, if you only had an intellectual understanding of the person you are dating or married to, could you actually say you had a relationship with them?  If you only spoke to them and didn’t hear from them, could you say you have a relationship with them?  You might know the most trivia about them, analyzed their movements and habits to an obsessive degree, studied all their social media posts, and know ever single one of their likes and dislikes and political opinions.  You would know them, certainly…but could you say you had a relationship with them?  You certainly couldn’t say that you had a healthy relationship.  You couldn’t say that you obsessive fanboy/fangirling had created a fruitful relationship.  

Brennan asks a series of questions that show the consequences of this “obsessive fan” attitude. 

“Why don’t our contagious joy, enthusiasm, and gratitude infect others with a longing for Christ?  Why are the fire and spirit of Peter and Paul so conspicuously absent from our pallid existence?  Perhaps because so few of us have undertaken the journey of faith across the chasm between knowledge and experience.  We prefer to read the map rather than visit the place.  The speaker of our actual unbelief persuades us that it is not the experience that is real but, rather, our explanation of the experience.”

For your own precious and holy sake, please read that again.

In our bible studies and small groups and Sunday school classes it is remarkably less awkward to ask for a recitation of the five points of Calvanism than it is to ask when was the most recent time that God showed up for you.  It is easier to discuss dispensationalism than it is to talk about the sin we are struggling with.  It is easier to rattle off the date of our recitation of the sinner’s prayer and subsequent baptism than it is to talk about how the Spirit has been moving in our life.  Why?!  

Because knowledge is tame.  We can grasp knowledge.  Knowledge of God is safe and calculable.  It fits in a nice spreadsheet that we can then double check our theology with.  Experience…well experience is wild, unpredictable, and off the map of our immediate understanding.  

So much of my life I have metaphorically spent learning about sailing but not actually getting on a boat.  In recent years I’ve gotten on the ship but not taken it out onto the ocean.  Oh, I’ve raised and lowered the sails a lot.  I’ve shouted orders and swabbed some decks and scrapped the hull in dry dock.  None of that makes me a sailor.  

Manning quotes Daniel Taylor in pointing out how this works within the church. 

“The secular world of ideas plays the doubting game almost exclusively and is scornful of anyone who doesn’t.  Ironically, however, the church also plays this game to a great extent.  The mystery of the gospel, the paradox of the incarnation, and the wondrous enigma of grace are freeze-dried into a highly rationalized and/or authoritarian system of theologies, codes, rules, prescriptions, orders of service, and forms of church government.  Everything is written down, everything is organized, so that all can be certain and those in error detected.”

That is not life.  It certainly isn’t the “life more abundantly” that Jesus said He came to give us.  It is everything that acknowledges the “form” but denies the “power”.

When you engage in a theological and intellectual assertion to a set of facts about how the world works and how people work you will inevitably only embrace an ideal, a set of behaviors that are preferred and effective over others.  There is plenty of utility in that.  You can make something of a better world or a better existence for yourself that way.  It is like owning a full size statue of Julius Caesar so that you can gaze upon it and remember that you want to be like him…minus the messy exit of course.

But…what if you came to discover that the statue was alive, that it spoke, that you could feel a pulse in its wrist and it wanted to ask you questions and answer yours.  That would freak many out.  That is precisely what we are being called to.  It is precisely what the entire human species has been called to since the beginning of time.

I will be honest.  It is far simpler to work with a spreadsheet.  It is far easier to steer a ship that is still moored to the dock.  Nothing will happen to you there.  But that’s just the problem.  Nothing will happen to you there.

The LORD God is a person.  Not a human, mind you, but a being.  His first statement as to who He is was to declare His being.  “I AM”.  He is a being with thoughts, emotions, passions, and desires.  He is not some far off figure, some statue to admire and say, “Gosh, I wanna be like Him”.  He can be experienced on this side of eternity.  If you are in Christ, part of you already knows this to be true.  Part of you thinks it’s too wonderful, too exotic, too strange to be possible even though it is exactly what you want to be true.  

If He wasn’t satisfied initially to give the ten commandments in stone tablet form but from His own lips…if He wasn’t content to keep Israel away but invited the elders to come and eat with Him and they could see His feet…if He tore the thick temple veil in two at the death of Jesus declaring there was no longer any separation…if He gave us His Holy Spirit to abide in us so that we would abide (literally make our home) in and with Him…then what makes us think that this is all merely an intellectual exercise of “faith” and that we should be content to hide behind theology when He comes looking for us in the Garden in the cool of the day?

I beg you to cast off from the moorings.  I plead with you to long for more; and not just because there is more to be had but because He wants to give you more.  

The assurance that we have “all spiritual blessing through Christ Jesus” shouldn’t just be a comfort to fall back.  It should awaken within us a desire to see what we haven’t yet laid ahold of; how much is actually in the bank account, as it were.

“Adventure is out there!”, because HE is out there.  

And He is the greatest adventure of all time.

(As ever, I thank you for reading.  If you’ve made it this far please consider liking, sharing, commenting, and subscribing.)